GUEST POST How Edward Stourton misunderstood The Orange Book

Simon Titley is a member of the Liberator Collective.

When is an analysis not an analysis? When it’s the latest edition of Radio 4’s ‘Analysis’ programme, titled ‘The Orange Book: Clegg’s Political Lemon?’ and presented by Edward Stourton. It was a disappointing attempt to analyse the influence the The Orange Book has had over the Liberal Democrats. (If you haven’t heard it yet, listen online here).

The programme demonstrated a fault common to most media reports of the inner workings of political parties; London-based journalists just don’t get it. The ‘Westminster Village’ is their comfort zone. It is where political elites propose and dispose. The political grassroots, on the other hand, is a diffuse, messy and confusing world. It is more difficult to comprehend and report, which is why the media resort to simple, hand-me-down narratives.

The template was cast by Labour’s internecine warfare in the 1980s between Neil Kinnock and the Militant tendency. Most members of all mainstream parties bear no resemblance to Militant, but why let the truth get in the way of a good story? The media has framed the debate about internal party politics in terms of a wise and all-knowing elite confronting a backward and unruly membership.

This frame is exploited by each of the party’s elites, who monopolise the language of modernity and maturity to denigrate their own members. Recall how Charles Kennedy, in the wake of the 2005 general election, blamed the Liberal Democrats’ disappointing result on “embarrassing policies introduced by grassroots activists”.

It is in this light that Radio 4’s programme should be seen. David Laws’s central claim – that the Orange Book had served both to ‘modernise’ the Liberal Democrats and to make them fit for government – was accepted without question because it suits the media frame.

A programme called ‘Analysis’ ought to, well, analyse. But this episode lacked depth and was notable more for the salient information it left out than for what it included. The Orange Book was described as a “putsch” but there was no analysis of who was behind it. The book was credited to David Laws but there was no mention of his co-editor, hedge-fund millionaire Paul Marshall, who bankrolled the project.

There was no mention of Mark Oaten, who played a key role in the genesis of the Orange Book. And there was no mention of the various ginger groups set up in the early 2000s (such as Liberal Future and the Peel Group), which accompanied the emergence of this right-wing trend.

The programme presented the Orange Book as a coherent project. There was no mention of the infighting that broke out among the book’s authors at the time of publication in 2004. The authors had agreed that each would circulate their drafts to the others before the book went to press. But David Laws infuriated some of his fellow authors by not circulating his chapter (which controversially proposed a system of social insurance).

Then, to avoid more trouble during the September 2004 party conference, Charles Kennedy ordered Laws to cancel his planned book launch event. Meanwhile, Mark Oaten disowned his chapter completely, claiming it had been written by a research assistant and that he hadn’t even read it.

More importantly, the programme failed to analyse where the Orange Book project is going. There was no mention of the role of Paul Marshall’s CentreForum think tank and its Coalition 2.0 exercise, which is now the focus of the right-wingers’ strategy. The plan appears to be to lock the Liberal Democrats into a longer-term pact with the Tories. If the right’s coalition exit strategy is not to exit, one might have thought this was worth a mention.

There was no exploration of the lack of democratic legitimacy of the Orange Bookers’ rise to power. At no stage has the party ever been formally asked whether it wanted an ideological shift from social liberalism to classical liberalism. The right-wingers have pursued their goals almost wholly through extra-constitutional means. The avoidance of open debate suggests they lack confidence in their ability to win any arguments.

There was no analysis of why the current right-wing trend emerged when it did, around the time of Charles Kennedy’s election as Liberal Democrat leader in 1999. Most of the people in what we call ‘the right wing’ are ideological shape-shifters, who were social democratic and pro-merger in the 1980s, then Blairite and pro-Project in the 1990s.

Kennedy’s election effectively put an end to ‘The Project’ (Paddy Ashdown’s plan to bind the Liberal Democrats to Labour), which Labour’s landslide in 1997 had made redundant in any case. The right therefore needed an alternative ideological flag of convenience. To the extent that the right’s attachment to neoliberalism is sincere, the programme failed to challenge David Laws (or anyone else) about the continuing validity of neoliberalism after the recent financial crisis has thoroughly discredited that ideology.

The programme took the Orange Book on its own terms as a serious political tract. But the book turns out to be mostly a rag-bag of half-baked ideas. Since few people have bothered to read it, the actual content is not that important. Instead, the book’s role has been more symbolic – as a rallying point for the right and a lightning rod for left-wing opposition.

The claim that the 2007 leadership election campaign was between “two Orange Bookers” is questionable. Both candidates wrote a chapter in the Orange Book but both chapters were about international policy and not economic liberalism. The leadership election was notable for the avoidance of any ideological debate. The programme didn’t enquire why Nick Clegg effectively hid his right-wing aims until after he became leader. His consequent lack of a mandate to steer the party rightwards wasn’t explored.

In its report of the social liberal reaction, the programme failed to mention the response to the Orange Book, Reinventing the State. The casual listener would have been left with the impression that only the right wing is doing any thinking. Also, social liberalism and social democracy were conflated throughout the programme. Those of us who remember the era of the merger, when there was mutual hostility between the SDP and the Liberal left, know differently!

This is probably why the programme failed to notice one significant (and unintended) effect the Orange Book had on the Liberal Democrats, which was to end the taboo on ideological argument that had existed within the party since the merger.

The programme’s claim that the coalition wouldn’t have happened without the Orange Book is rubbish. A coalition with the Tories was the Orange Bookers’ wet dream. Ironically, it happened despite the Orange Book rather than because of it. One year before the 2010 general election, right-wingers succeeded in toppling Chris Rennard as the party’s chief executive and election campaign head. Nick Clegg installed a team of right-wingers to run the campaign but they made a complete hash of it, with a net loss of seats.

Coalition is a creature of circumstance. The Orange Bookers got what they wanted only because the election result left the Liberal Democrats with little viable choice, as the overwhelming vote at the special conference subsequently demonstrated. The Orange Bookers might have played a more significant role if the parliamentary arithmetic had been different, with an equal possibility of a coalition with either the Tories or Labour. Then, we would have seen a very nasty factional campaign to ensure the party went into coalition with the Tories and not Labour.

Radio 4’s programme was a sloppy piece of journalism. Given the importance of the Liberal Democrats as coalition partners, listeners deserved better. What conclusions might a better-made programme have reached?

First, it would have recognised that the Orange Book is a symptom and not a cause. The present phase of right-wing machinations began in the late 1990s and the book was just one product of this intrigue (albeit a high-profile one).

Second, the programme would have grasped that most of party’s leading right-wingers are ideological tarts who have regularly switched from one political fad to another. The ideology they profess at any given time is less about fundamental values, more about tactical positioning. For them, the strategy has always been to say “me too” to the political establishment’s flavour of the week, in the belief that conforming to orthodoxy will provide a short cut to power.

Sure, there are some true believers in neoliberal ideology, but they will be abandoned when it is expedient, just as the right eventually dumped the Jenkinsite social democrats in the mid-1990s.

The real divide within the Liberal Democrats has never really been about ideology. On one side is a self-appointed elite convinced that it knows best; that politics is all about the people at the top; that if we want to be “serious about power” then we must become more centralised and jettison party democracy; and that the job of party members is to shut up and deliver the leaflets.

And then there is the alternative view; that democracy is not about a passive choice between brands but about an active choice between competing values; and that politics is healthiest when it involves ordinary people, living similar lives to those amongst whom they campaign, empowering local people to take and use power.

The Orange Book was really just another exercise in elite manoeuvring. But if Edward Stourton had read Liberator instead of relying on inexperienced researchers, he would have known that already.